Page:The Evolution of British Cattle.djvu/154

 table will show the grades of stock each grade of bull should get with each grade of cow: —

But the greatest difficulty of all perhaps is that a bull's grade is not known till he is at least five or six years old. How is this to be overcome? The pioneers adopted two methods; they kept their bulls till their grades, so to speak, were known—Hugh Watson's Old Jock won the sweepstakes at the Highland Society's Show at Perth when he was ten years old—and they bred from closely related animals. The former method was safest; the latter placed the chances on the right side, for there is a higher probability of the same characters being carried by near than by distant relations. But, just as the AberdeenAngus breed has been gradually made hornless, so, by constantly selecting the breeding stock—the bulls are the most important—from high grade cows a whole breed could be raised eventually to the highest milking capacity.

If the hybrids between high grade and